From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. Golden rods are powerhouses, keys-done plants that serve as hosts for more than 100 species of butterflies and moss and as rich, late-season sources of pollen and nectar for countless beneficial insects. And as if that were not enough, they also produce seed that supports various birds. Now Mt. Cuba Center, the native plant Garden and Research Institution in Delaware, has published the results of its three-year trial of 70 different golden rods. And their manager of horticultural research Sam Houdley is here to tell us what they

learned. So more in a moment about the best golden rods and how to use them in your garden, but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, colorblends.com.

And bye. top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Urbalfe seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMoengCedes.com. And by White Flowerflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants on the web, Whiteflower Farm.com. Sam Haudley is the manager of Horticultural Research at Mount Cuba Center where he evaluates native plant species, old and new cultivars, and hybrids in the famed Mount Cuba Trial Garden. I also forward to our conversations and to getting his first hand insights into each gene as they explore there. And Sam will also be presenting a virtual class on golden rod February 18th from 6 to 7 30 pm. So more on that and how to sign up with the transcript of the show over on away to garden.com. But meantime, welcome back to the program Sam, how are? I'm good, Margaret. Thanks so much for having me back. Happy winter. Yes, happy winter. No golden rods right now. No, no. We can think about green things. While we have this conversation, but everything's a little white, I would say at the moment. Yes, yes, yes. Well, I was so glad that this report was out because I mean mean, as I said in the introduction powerhouses and there's your keystone plants, I mean, one only has to go stand adjacent to a field or a meadow or whatever in the late later part of the season, the fall or whatever, and just look at the life, listen to the life, it's literally a buzz, and know the power of these plants. So it must have been a really lively, literally lively trial. Yes, absolutely. The insect activity was off the charts. It was higher than at least the volume of insects and the diversity of insects that we were seeing coming to visit the golden rods and supporting this incredible diverse web of life just in the trial garden itself was was incredible. Since then we've also included a Pignantum trials where we're seeing lots of insects with that we're keeping that theme theme going. The golden rods are just, if you're looking for a group of plants to just help amplify your home garden in terms of the value can provide wildlife, golden rods are a really, really great place to start. And yet I think a lot of gardeners are a little cautious shy, gun shy because there are some that have of, oh, they're so invasive or whatever they get out of hand and so and so funny anecdote I had a workshop here a few years ago with a visiting botanist neighbor. She was doing a lot of the teaching and I were up in the meadow above my house and the you know the student visitors or whatever we're all sitting around and I'm, you know,

pontificating. And I'm saying, you know, well, I'm so worried because, you know, I'm very worried that Canada Golden Rod is going to come into my little meadow and it is a small meadow and, you know, and that's going to take over and, you know, and I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, and my friend, to the botanist. She sort of walks away and she walks into the meadow and she comes back

and she lays down five stalks of golden rod on the ground by the students, parallel to one another, very beautifully. And like I said, life. And she says she looks at me without being insulted or anything, without being insults here. And what she says, she says very college is, Margaret, you have five species of golden rub, but you don't have Canada golden rub. And I didn't plant anything. My motto was just a, I un-mode. I stopped mowing. That's what happened, you know, because I'm in a rural area. So, so, you know, people worry about, oh, it's invasive, but that's not the case with all of

them by any means, is it?

No, and that's something we saw in the trial quite a lot. I think golden rods are often maligned for a few reasons. One of them being that people, I think many people can recognize a golden rod when they see it. kind of in that category of roses and Pienes,

people maybe who aren't even gardeners can see it,

you know, that yellow flower in the fall

and thank the golden rod.

But a lot of times are those, as initial thoughts about golden rods in general is, you know, these are aggressive plants or, you know, they cause allergies. And of course, there's nuance to the aggressive nature of golden rod. There is no nuance to the allergies. All golden rods have that one thing in common,

so they don't cause allergies, which is great for us. Right, they're always confused with ragweed. Exactly. They sort of happen at the same time, and the pollen from ragweed is the deal, right? Exactly. That's exactly right. Golden rod pollen is heavy, it relies on insects to move it around, so that pollen is not airborne. It's not getting into our lungs and to our sinuses.

But in terms of the aggressive nature of goldmau, it really does exist on spectrum. And we saw a few plants in the goldmau trial. We evaluated 70 different kinds. I would say maybe three or four of those species are plants that I would categorize as aggressive. And the rest were, if you will, fairly well-behaved. A lot of them are clump forming. A lot of them were a little bit shorter than I think I might have imagined Golden Rods being in my mind. And a lot of them are really great candidates for more managed traditional home landscapes. It's not to say the aggressive plants don't belong anywhere, and there's certainly uses for them. We think of those plants as really great candidates for restoration settings where you need a plant that has a more competitive edge to it. And in terms of biomass and supporting wildlife, caterpillars, insects, plants like solid egg ball, altissimo and solid egg

who canadensis are phenomenal at supporting a

tremendous amount of wildlife.

So it's one of those plants, it's really just right,

plant, right place, but vast majority of bull nrods

really are not that aggressive at all.

So altissimo, what's its common name?

Canadensis would be the Canada golden rod

that I mentioned earlier.

What's altissimo's common-named do you support? Altismas is tall golden rod. Tall golden rod, right, okay, good. And those are two that are a little, those are stronger growers. Yes, they are. And canadensis, I think a lot of times, a lot of these taller, more aggressive golden rods get lumped under canadensis. The least around Mt. Cuba Center, most of the plants you see on road sides and in old fields are on solid-ego altissima. There's actually relatively few specimens of solid-ego canadensis in our natural lands. Well, and that speaks to like taking a closer look, because as you point it out, even from a distance as you're driving by and you look from the road, the edge of the road into a field in the distance, you can say, oh, it's golden rod season, but which golden rod? And they are hard to tell apart unless you really slow down, aren't they? Yes. But once you do, you start to see diversity and foliage and form and have it when those plants are in bloom. And that was the other thing we saw too is just this incredible season of flowers. It was both these 70 golden rods. Of course you have kind of this peak golden rod season in September, October. We had plants starting to bloom in May, June, July. We had a couple golden rods that extended their bloom season all the way into November. So with just this one genus, you can have flowers supporting wildlife, beautifying your garden for months out of the year. Yeah, once you kind of take a, once you slow down a little bit and you look at your golden rods, there's a lot more nuance out there. And as you said, in your meta alone, you had five species. That's incredible in a relatively small area, mentioned. Right. And again, I didn't do anything. I didn't plant anything. Right? It's just they were in the seed bank when I stopped mowing that field above my house years ago and let whatever was going to happen happen. They sprung up. They were in there. And yeah, do you around Mount Cuba? Are there a lot of species that you haven't planted? Are there a lot of literally native species to that area? Yes, there's some really cool plants. Our natural lands are home to several really cool golden rods. Some of them would be familiar to gardeners, like loose stem golden rods, exact golden rod. They're in our woodlands around here, Solidego Casio and Flexicolus. Probably pretty familiar to gardeners and a great candidate for shaded gardens. We have Solidego Altissima, it's very common in our natural lands, a few Solidego canadence patches. We also have another species that's relatively tall and I think sometimes considered to be an aggressive plant called Soledigo-Jajantia, which is a beautiful plant that occurs really in kind of wet meadows, kind of seabed areas, and is a perfect companion with New York iron leaves. They bloom at the same time, so you have this kind of concert of yellow and purple, really a stunning display. You did a trial of iron weeds, didn't you? We did, And we actually teased a little photo of that wet meadow with the New York Ironweed and Solitego Joggiotea together, which is one of my favorite places at Mount Cuba Center just to see these kind of plants in their natural habitat and to see them thriving together and to observe all the insects that are coming in. And we have a couple other somewhat more, I would say obscure species as well, including Solidae Gopacula, which really grows in kind of these wet woodlands, these big leafy rosettes that come up in the spring and these very tall architectural and fluorescence's beautiful plants, somewhat uncommon in this area, but another candidate for shaded gardens. Early golden rods, solid-egoed juncia,

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